Can you use Normal Maps with Tiled?

Questions
1

Is it possible to use Normal Maps with Tiled?

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2

Not specifically, but Tiled doesn’t stop you from setting a normal map for the material you use in your game.

If you want it to be tile-specific you could use properties. This would only be visible within Tiled as a string though and would have to be handled on import.

3

is there a tutorial or documentation somewhere?
Or can I just use another Layer and later export 2 tilemaps (with normal maps on separate tilemap)?
I’m not sure how to use Properties for this.

4

The property would have the (relative) path to the normals texture as its value.

But you could also think about having seperate textures for each tile with a corresponding texture with the same name and then something appended (like _NORMALS) that would be linked to the correct material when importing the map into your game.

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5

Hello, did you find a way to add a normal map?

6

There are two basic approaches:

  1. Load your normal map texture(s) as another Tileset in Tiled, and use it alongside other maps. This is appropriate if your normals are independent of the main texture, which is somewhat unusual.

  2. Have your normal map(s) as just images that correspond to your regular tilesets, named in such a way that you can easily find the normal map if you have the base texture’s file name. You wouldn’t use these in Tiled at all, but you’d load them in your engine as needed. This method is appropriate if the normals for each tile are always the same; this is the more common scenario.

  3. Same as (2), but instead of using the filename to figure out where the normal map file is, add a custom file property on the original Tileset that points to the normal map image. For Image Collections, you’d probably add properties to each Tile instead, pointing to each separate image’s normal mao.

There is no way to preview the 3D effect of normal maps in Tiled and such a feature is unlikely to be added, normal maps in Tiled are just images, and it’s up to you to use them as normals in your game when you load the maps. The way to do this depends on your engine, and has nothing to do with Tiled at all.

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